ALH Online Review, Series XV 1 Christopher Pizzino, Arresting

Home , Black Hole (comics), Jaime Hernandez

ALH Online Review, Series XV 1

Christopher Pizzino, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 245 pp.

Reviewed by Adrielle Mitchell, Nazareth College

In Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature, Christopher Pizzino argues that despite the growth market in “graphic novels,” the uptick in comics-related course offerings at the university level, and the professionalization of comics studies (through the establishment of dedicated organizations, peer-reviewed journals, museum exhibits, degree programs, etc.), contemporary US comics still grapple with anxieties related to cultural status and legitimacy. This status-consciousness, according to Pizzino, weaves itself into both content and form, casting a troubling shadow across even acclaimed works by top comics creators (among them, Pizzino’s four case studies: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller; Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel; Black Hole by Charles Burns; and the Palomar story arc first begun in Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez, particularly brothers Gilbert and Jaime). Charting the course of this “struggle with illegitimacy” in contemporary comics, Pizzino offers a new term, “autoclasm” (or self-breaking), to capture how comics struggle against themselves, and reveal—consequently—the dis-ease of this moment in the history of comics production and reception.

Astutely, Pizzino calls comics studies back to questions it thought it had left far behind: Have comics “grown up?” Are they “not just for kids anymore”? If so, at what cost? Is a developmental paradigm even the right way to approach the question? Pizzino thinks not. Early chapters of Arresting Development offer a cogent and succinct summary of twentieth-century comics, from their emergence in newspaper strips through the golden and silver ages of superhero comic books, right up to the crisis of public disapprobation marked most saliently by the publication of psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, an indictment of comics—especially those in the horror and crime genres— as a corruptor of youth, and the subsequent 1954 Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings. As is well known, those hearings spurred such major comics distributors as EC and Marvel to voluntarily establish a gentling “Comics Code” to which they would adhere. Pizzino, as do many other comics scholars, believes that this self- censorship significantly constricted the range of experimentation done in the medium, along with a similar constriction of age-appropriateness, with far-reaching effects that continue to this day. He shows that this self-censorship by both publishers and the artists engenders a particularly conflicted type of creation: “Contemporary comics are marked, again and again, by the stigma of illegitimacy, and this marking is active, complex, and deeply fraught” (4).

Exploring this history brings Pizzino to good questions about what it means for a medium to grow up, which in turn leads him to unpack the bildungsroman paradigm as it relates to the genre of coming-of-age narratives across a broad range of forms and media, as well as a conceptual framework for discussing development itself (of persons, of genres, of a medium). Bringing both literary and comics studies to bear, Pizzino offers evidence from a range of critics, including Franco Moretti and subsequent postcolonial theorists, on cultural exclusion and inclusion in the bildungsroman. He supplements that analysis by considering seminal texts from theorists of comics and visual studies like W. J. T. Mitchell, Hillary Chute, Charles Hatfield, and Thierry Groensteen, and he undertakes admirable close readings of panels and pages from his four case studies. Pizzino reads with and against the grain of these comics, revealing what they show, but he is equally interested in what they fail to show, or what they simultaneously reveal and conceal about their own status as comics.

This question of how a comic makes legible its ease and dis-ease with its own medium is fruitfully explored through Pizzino’s sense of autoclasm as it plays out in the type of comics most readily accepted today: the long-form, square-bound graphic novel. After a fairly comprehensive synopsis of the development in the US of this “one-off” form and its quick acceptance (vis-à-vis the still-marginal position of comic books, zines, serials) in academia and other so-called serious venues, Pizzino turns his attention, one text at a time, to contemporary examples that manifest their ambivalence in unique ways. Pizzino studies Miller’s Batman for the seeming paradox of Batman’s prosocial tendencies and his possibly antisocial role as muse and mentor to violent youth splinter groups like the Sons of Batman and the Mutants. Even diegetically, Batman, as figured in The Dark Knight Returns, is a crime-fighter with significant problems of legitimacy. On what authority does he mete out punishment? Are his confrontations rooted in communal justice or just a byproduct of his personal struggle? Thinking back to Code-era censorship, just what message can youth derive from this hero/antihero?

In his analysis of Bechdel’s Fun Home, Pizzino takes up a different aspect of legitimacy, that of the graphic work as “literary.” Noting that intertextual references (to canonical texts by Proust, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Wilde, and others) have made this graphic narrative a darling of scholars, particularly those from literary studies, Pizzino cannily notes the inclusion of a parallel—but significantly smaller—set of intrapanel elements that represent specific comics or depict someone reading a comic book, each of which goes relatively unnoticed in the critical bibliography. Furthermore, Pizzino queries the status- signaling gesture inherent in Bechdel’s decision to incorporate so many high culture references in her text, pointing to her criticism of those accolades that call it (merely) a “top graphic novel.” She parries, “What do you mean? It’s a great book!” (qtd. in 109).

Next, Pizzino turns to Burns’s Black Hole, which explores a sexually transmitted disease making its way through a cohort of teens, causing symptoms and deformities that differ in degree of visibility, leading some infected kids to try to pass as normal and others to exile themselves to escape ostracism. Pizzino presents this text’s representation of deformity and disease as a return of the repressed of the pre-Comics Code horror genre of comics. Arguing, rightly, that this genre’s potential went largely unexplored as comics creators and publishers acquiesced to the general post-Wertham/Senate Subcommittee horror at horror, Pizzino connects the diegetic focus on social exclusion to the parallel form of inclusivity/exclusivity visible in the obvious preference for some genres (coded as “art comics” or literary graphic novels) over others (particularly horror, but also pornography, fantasy, crime) by critics and readers.

Pizzino’s final case study offers an important reading of agency vs. victimization in Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez’s Love and Rockets. This case study analyzes the depiction of violence in graphic works (another pre-Code hot button), a process Pizzino aptly terms “visual forensics” (171). He shows how the Hernandezes cleverly use drawing techniques to control how we read violent images, including the use of obscuring elements, such as smoke and flames that engulf some characters and erase others, along with large “blood” ink blots that spread over victims rendering them nearly unrecognizable. These techniques make visible the tragic destruction (and obliteration/erasure) of key characters in the narrative. Pizzino guides the reader’s eye to the complex navigation of questions of power and powerlessness that these artists offer in their representations of the cause and effect of violence. Keeping his larger questions of legitimacy and status in mind, Pizzino helps us to think critically about an underexamined Latinx narrative while he simultaneously complicates any status-based dismissal of the (putatively “low”) sub- genre of violence in comics.

Unquestionably, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature is an important contribution to the literature on contemporary US comics. A strong reader of the comics page and panel, Pizzino is at least as attentive to visual elements as to textual (a combination all too often lacking in otherwise responsive criticism), and his arguments are original and worthy of consideration. He is clearly at his best teasing out formal elements in his case studies, though his two controlling ideas, autoclasm and the bildungsroman, prove helpful ways to think through the specific cases. Even so, his monograph might have benefited from more attention to coherence. Though Pizzino does gesture back in later chapters to the theoretical foundation elaborated in the Introduction and chapters 1 and 2, he leaves it to the reader to do most of the connective work, especially between and among the case studies. Another weakness, perhaps, is that the study is narrowly focused on the history, concerns, and development of comics in the US. Though this makes sense in light of the focus on legitimization, which must be read in

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] 4 ALH Online Review, Series XV the particular national context of a medium’s reception, some attention to questions of the bildungsroman and legitimacy in the global field of comics would have provided an interesting counterpoint to the US narrative. At the very least, it would help the reader to see more clearly that the status of comics as lowbrow culture is a particularly narrow and a particularly national conception, rooted in uniquely American concerns with status and maturity.